The Importance of Context: Children of Immigrants in the United Kingdom

• In Event: 4151 - International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 14: Global Migration I

Abstract

Numerous studies of the United Kingdom demonstrate that outcomes for children of immigrants vary by ethnicity, but few test mechanisms to explain these results or engage with the significant heterogeneity within ethnic groups. Immigration scholarship in the United States has fruitfully harnessed models of group-level contextual effects in explaining individual outcomes. The first to implement such a methodology in the United Kingdom, this study elucidates the group-level factors most salient for verbal and quantitative cognitive achievement, socioemotional development, and likelihood of obesity for children of immigrants in the Millennium Cohort Study. By harnessing a range of indicators of both sending- and receiving-country context in three-level growth models, this paper finds that group-level average education, proportion with refugee status, and measured discrimination significantly affect the outcomes of children of immigrants, even in models controlling for individual factors. Furthermore, although sending-country values are insignificant for achievement and development, such values are significantly associated with the likelihood of childhood obesity.

Author

• Nathan Isaac Hoffmann, University of California, Los Angeles